Metanoia

It was our first dinner together and you asked: “What would it be like if we didn’t have a body and communicated as spirits do?”. The evening was cool and we were both midway through our artichokes, your haddock and my medium-rare steak. A man throws a red ball to his Dalmatians outside the restaurant. A blur of black and white and red. Two couples can be overheard arguing about dry cleaning two tables down. Funny how you can meet someone and you can’t wait to take their clothes off. A year later and you’re fighting in public about the dry-cleaning. Imperfections are built into the design. Being all spirits none of this would be noticeable. Not even your smile, the contours of you, how I can make out constellations from your freckles, the hair that falls across your eyes that shimmer like fireflies in this candlelight, the way you’ve hooked your legs under the chair, that you are petite but your legs are like a long sentence I can’t finish, and I love the way you speak English in that accent, and never before has anyone said “‘addock” the way you say it, it’s no longer a smoked fish but a word that sounds like – the word that comes to mind is dismissed and is love. Beauty isn’t beauty because it’s perfect. I share your gaze. Disconcerting, the way you look at me, what were we talking about? “That’s a weird question” was my reply, “I’ll think about an answer after dessert”. “Which is?” she raises the question as a test, my answer was apple crumble. There’s that wry smile. Tomorrow marks three years from that dinner, you’re gone and that is what I remember of our first dinner as I am walking in the rain, my collar against the wind, the stars absent in this darkness, the gleam of puddles under battery light and farther away, the sound of car travelling the main road, but here and now the lone sound of my footsteps and my breathing.